I gave myself permission to just be during the first few days of self-quarantine. If I were a more glamorous woman—or perhaps, just a better woman—this would’ve involved early mornings, stretching, meditating, and sweating (in a pastel Outdoor Voices co-ord, no less) before dressing up in a proper suit to sit at my desk, in my home office, to work from home. Upholding discipline of the highest form would be no different than breathing, and a need to perform secretive, un-Instagrammable things (or SSBs, dubbed by Carrie Bradshaw in a pre-social media age) simply wouldn’t exist. Instead, my deepest, truest desires were nothing close to that of an exemplary, dream self. Slothfulness was what I embodied, because three days prior, 15-hour work days were my norm; now I had the liberty—the luxury!—of lounging. And as a newfound lady of leisure, I did the absolute least. Snacked the most. Watched just enough Bravo to silence the constant urge to make to-do lists. Needless to say, none of these moments made it to the grid, much less my Stories.

By Monday, I had enough. (Of the TV, not the snacking.) I needed to do something more that didn’t require physical exertion. The solution? A reading marathon where I would read one book a day for however long this self-isolation lasts.

DAY 1: UNTAMED

I wanted to ease myself into this self-set challenge, so I chose Glennon Doyle’s acclaimed Untamed knowing that I had a winning chance at completion by end of day. Pop memoirs tend to be an easier read, I knew, but what I didn’t know was how enamored I would become. I devoured it not because it was skim-able, but because every sentence was charged with emotion, body, and depth.

“I am a sensitive, introverted woman, which means I love humanity but actual human beings are tricky,” she writes. I have never felt more seen. Had I not been wearing this Collagen-infused lip mask I would have chanted a resounding series of yes, yes, yes!-es after every chapter.

DAY 2: UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Never one to shirk a thematic moment, I chose Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader as my second book of the week. How apropos, given the context—but also because Vivian Gornick is someone whose thoughts so closely mime mine (but with greater intellect, of course). The way she reads, the way she writes! And the way she lives her life—happier unmarried, with two cats that couldn’t be bothered, spending her life between pages. Gornick is an aspiration.

And inspired by her love for reading and re-reading, I decided that I, too, would start annotating my books.

DAY 3: THE SEAS

Samantha Hunt’s The Seas isn’t a book I would typically buy for my personal library, but this was one of Maggie Nelson’s favorite novels—and because Emma Roberts endorsed it on Belletrist, I thought I needed it, too. (Book purchases are rarely influenced, but this was an exception: I grew up watching, and loving, Unfabulous.)

I went in with an open mind. It had been years since I read true fiction, and this was a reminder of just how much my mind missed it. Cover to cover, in one sitting, I inhaled every word: Not because it was the most lyrical of storylines, but because the fantasy was so addictive. If there was a time to indulge in another world and allow yourself to be transported elsewhere, this would be it. Sink your teeth into something otherworldly and for a few hours, allow yourself the freedom to forget the madness around you.

This I read (inadvertently) under the glow of an oversized Himalayan salt rock lamp, marinating in Crème de la Mer.

DAY 4: STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER

I bought this copy—slightly worn with yellowed pages—over the summer from one The Strand’s satellite pop-ups in Times Square. I can never resist a book stand, and when I saw that one of my favorite authors was sitting in the clearance stack, I snapped it up.

For months it remained unread because Tom Robbins, though a magician with words, requires unbounded energy to read. Characters are a-plenty and storylines are multitudinous, therefore not meant for skimming. However, I was buoyed by newfound confidence in my ability to keep to one book a day, and ravenous for good fiction, I started to read.

The omniscient narrator is asked what he is looking for in a typewriter. He responds:

“Something more than words. Crystals. I want to send my readers armloads of crystals, some of which are the colors of orchids and pennies, some of which pick up radio signals from a secret city that is half Paris and half Coney Island.”

… and immediately, I know that I have chosen the perfect novel.

Still Life with Woodpecker was written in the 1980s but its foreboding relevance to current events is haunting: So little has changed in the last few decades. I opened up to the first page and the scene felt all too familiar: “[A]t a time when western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be exciting, much of the world sat on edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting—with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui—for something momentous to occur.” Momentous in the book, like this very moment in 2020, turns out to be something catastrophic that takes the cast by surprise.

Despite the eerie parallels, Robbins is a writer who leaves me in awe. How he breathes life into inanimate objects—like a “typewriter that could type real kisses, ooze semen and sweat”—is artistry. How he presents a lesson at every turn: poignant, never soap box-y. I’ve realized that I read less for the story and more for the construction: let me study and gawk at his word choices and the magic that evoked from them.

“We may think we’re paying attention to this, that, or the other, but our dreams tell us what we’re really interested in. Dreams never lie. […] We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we’ve forgotten 90% of what went on. That’s why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember dreams for us.”

It’s difficult for me to let myself completely go into this realm of his because I’m so entranced by the physicality of his phrasing. His writing is sensual, human, and undeniably charming: you settle into a rhythm and no matter how wild a twist or turn may be, there are no surprises because Robbins has guided you there, exactly where he wanted you—the reader—to be. You just nod, underline, mm, ahh, yes! as you discover the words for feelings or revelations you’ve always known, but could never so concisely verbalize.

“When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution. […] What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the f****ng nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.”

And this!

“Intimacy is the principle source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, poetry becomes esoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control.”

Even if there’s no mini allegory to chew upon, the analogies are superb:

“She got up and, like a vacuum cleaner with insomnia, roamed the room some more.”

Robbins talks about “Lunaception” (listening to your intuition and understanding your body in place of birth control), calls a typewriter a “paper banger,” somehow makes Vaseline interesting (petroleum jelly becomes a jar whose contents—a “luminous goo”—possess a “bashful yet sensuous glow”). A rebellious hippie, comic, and artiste, all at once.

When he wasn’t sing-song with his descriptors, he is precise. This was me last week, is me, always with my collection of objets:

“…she’d stroll through the flat…randomly picking up ashtrays, music boxes, coffee cups, letter openers, artifacts, or candies, boring into them until each expanded into a limitless world, every bit as rich and interesting as that other more physically mobile world about which she remained curious but from which she was once again isolated.”

Or is this insight into his own rituals of inspiration, before he writes?

DAY 5: HAPPINESS AS SUCH

Another (happy) accident: choosing to read a book with such pertinence to your current reality. Originally written by Natalia Ginzburg and later translated by Minna Proctor, Happiness as Such tells the story of Michele’s mess through a series of letters between family, friends, and an ex-lover. It’s a short, simple read that took me out of a rhythm I’ve become accustomed to (refined and lyrical) and into staccato whimsy (which is how real people write): a reminder that a story can be told without frills.

“It’s unfortunate that we rarely recognize the happy moments while we’re living them. We usually only recognize them with the distance of time. I was happy complaining about the way you were going through my dressers. But I have to say that you and I lost a precious day. […] Now I’m going to remember that day, not as a vaguely happy day, but as a day of essential truth for both of us, destined to illuminate your being and my being, the way we always speak with modest words, we never use clear and urgent words, our words are gray, harmless, floating, and useless.”

Read in the context of self-isolation, in the midst of a global pandemic: Ginzburg’s/Proctor’s words are piercing.

I miss school. I miss book reports, research reports, thesis reports—all of it. My notes during each reading session are pages long, and an indelible need to make sense of them (as we were all trained to do since grade school) led to a (selfish) decision to write these entries. (If you’re reading: thank you for indulging me.)

DAY 6: WHERE I WAS FROM

I decided to reward myself with Where I Was From, one of few works by Joan Didion I haven’t yet read. Four consecutive days was deserving of this comfort, this home, because few have mastered the lyricism with which she crafts her words. I underlined this sentence because it was so beautiful:

“…without much time for second thoughts, without much inclination toward equivocation, and later, when there was time or inclination, they developed a tendency, which I came to see as endemic, towards slight and majored derangements, apparently eccentric pronouncements, opaque bewilderment and moves to places not quite on the schedule.”

I’m reading this in spurts because I’m a little restless and my home is in need of a deep clean. I return at every pause point while getting my wardrobe-office (warfice, for short) in working order, and I can’t help but acknowledge the irony. “Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time,” Didion writes—and here I am, surrounded by the stuff I can’t let go of, trying to make sense of it all, find a place for it all, and in turn: have spent hours of my life on stuff. For what?

When you’re reading Joan Didion, you know you are safe. There are no bumps on this ride, just purring, humming, strumming. You read Didion because you want her perspective no matter the context—journalistic essay, memoir, novel—and yet, you never question her perspective as being anything other than the only truth. To be the most trusted narrator of them all: how?

She is peerless.

“I see now that the life I was raised to admire was entirely the product of this isolation, infinitely romantic, but in that kind of vacuum, it’s only antecedent aesthetic, and the aesthetic only the determined ‘bohemianism’ of 19th century San Francisco.”

Didion, on California—but also on isolation.

DAY 7: SCENES FROM A CHILDHOOD

To be honest, I’m not sure how I came across this book or why I purchased it at all, but I’m glad it came into my possession. I move through Jon Fosse’s Scenes From a Childhood (translated by Damion Searls) quickly, because the pace is simple and earnest—true to a kid’s stream of consciousness.

“Asle discovers he really likes [reading], because everything that in life only moves back-and-forth is like music somehow in the novel, so he really likes it, but it’s not exactly the same as music, because he knows what music is but this is a kind of music that goes back-and-forth and stays quiet and nice to think about.”

Which is why I read, too.

There are simple realizations that remind you of how significant the little things are: like when the narrator is reading, but can’t comprehend the meaning of the words:

“The next day, I bring a dictionary home from the school I go to. I look up a lot of words. I understand a little, and I’m happy.”

How can I possibly justify a Bottega Veneta Pouch when discovering magical sentences—or whimsical words like “moue”—bring infinitely more happiness? And as if on cue:

“I understand that some of what matters most is missing from our lives. So there needs to be a revolution.”

Each passage is as enlightening as it is heartbreaking. A peek inside this young boy’s head is a realm of epiphanies, of understanding, of growth, of hurt and pain and what living in an unjust reality means.

DAY 8: YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE

Although I read this during witching hours, I technically finished this before I went to bed—so I’m including this here. Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was another book that I can’t remember how I found, but I knew I added it to my cart because the title resonated. As one would expect, Kleeman uses her novel as commentary on present-day society and its effect on women. It’s culty and frightening, but it’s not far from reality—which is perhaps the scariest part of it all. This is the realization that begins to unravel all:

“A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own…”

And there’s the power—or crutch—that is makeup. The narrator admits to feeling more like herself when she has her face on, and when her roommate asks for a makeover, she sees her “disappearing, or reappearing, or appearing for the first time, whatever.”

The rest gets only spookier.

.   .   .

Until next time.

xx